Earlier this month, Alison and I marked our ninth wedding anniversary. In years past, I’d take the opportunity to write a post sharing some new thing that I’d learned. As the date came and went this year, I struggled to write this post.Read Article

Tags: Communication

Alison and I will celebrate our nine-year anniversary this fall. It’s been a very full and busy nine years. In fact, many of the plans that we set for ourselves way back then are just now coming to fruition. As the light at the end of the tunnel comes into view, we’re sprinting to the finish.Read Article

Tags: Communication

I’ve been out of school for more than a decade. Alison and I have four kids, own our home, and educate our children. We live far away from our families, so it’s just the six of us. While I’m still a young man, I’m a young man with grown-up responsibilities.Read Article

Tags: Communication

This blog has defended Pope Francis. He told us to go out into the Church and the world to make a mess. His pontificate has certainly achieved that objective. The Vatican’s moral abdication on China is disconcerting. Over a million ethic Uyghurs arbitrarily detained in concentration camps, and the Vatican said nothing. The Chinese Communist Party’s insistence on Sinicization of religion and even the accord allowing the CCP to co-appoint bishops adds to the concern. In addition to issues on the world stage, Pope Francis has regularly minimized the primary troubles of our day to include marriage, family life, and abortion.Read Article

Tags: Communication

Getting to Mass on a weekday is hard for me, and that was before the pandemic. The difficulty is not handling my four kids by myself for half an hour. It’s getting everyone up, dressed, fed, and in the pew by 8:30am. Lately our parish switched Mass times for the weekday liturgies to 5:00pm, another challenge for parents of little ones.Read Article

Tags: Communication

When I was in high school, we had neighbors who went for a family walk almost every evening. The family of four, along with their dog, could reliably be seen moving slowly through the neighborhood after dinner. I presume that they spent those evening walks reflecting on their days and chewing on life’s big questions.Read Article

Tags: Communication Wellness

Difficult times for Catholics are here. From the founding of our Church, community has been a central aspect of our faith. We gather, from our many walks of life, on a daily or weekly basis to celebrate the Eucharist, together. Increasingly, civil and health authorities are recommending the suspension of large gatherings. How do we celebrate our communal faith when we’re precluded from gathering in our parishes?Read Article

Tags: Communication Sacraments

Our society is suffering from an intellectual sickness. We lack curiosity. Ideas are no longer challenged and explored, but instead are accepted on their face. This lack of curiosity is leading many to believe the false notion that faith has no role to play in the life of the post-modern man.Read Article

Tags: Communication

At the beginning of 2019, I sat down to think about annual themes for my family. I wanted to have a lens through which we’d filter our daily life, especially our activities. Taking care of three kids and managing the household puts a lot on my plate. As my kids have grown, I haven’t done a good job involving them in the chores that maintaining a household requires. It’s time for that to change.Read Article

Tags: Communication Productivity

I was at our Credit Union last week conducting some business when one of the employees remarked that it was her parents’ wedding anniversary. A coworker commented on the happiness of the day, to which she responded, “Not really, they’re divorced.” The scope of divorce in our society is disheartening, and I wonder how many of them could have been prevented.Read Article

Tags: Communication Dating

I remember a time, a decade ago, when the Internet was fun. It was an open, collaborative place where you could find interesting articles and links, follow your friends, find a few laughs, and get a real sense of connection. It’s amazing what the passage of time can do, even a relatively short passage of time. Today, the Internet has become four or five main websites. Those sites are essentially ads, spyware, spam, and garbage.Read Article

Tags: Community Communication

I love this last week of the year. There’s a feeling of hope and anticipation for the New Year. We’re eager for this grand reset, and we even start believing that we can change our lives for the better. I'm ready for 2017 to be a change year.Read Article

Tags: Communication Dating Manliness

We live in an ailing culture. How far we have fallen from the America that De Tocqueville documented in his journeys. In many ways, I believe that the way that we live our daily lives has contributed to the toxic nature of our society. This article is about more than just an election or any one candidate. This article is about who we have become, and the dire implications that it entails.Read Article

Tags: Communication Political Life

One of my favorite activities is to pick an area of life where I need improvement and to work hard to make a change. I can only focus on one thing at a time, and that focus is what drives results. I’ve made big changes and little changes using this approach. One of my great regrets of the past six years is my lack of new meaningful friendships. I have friends from college that I connect with, but I haven't built many new friendships. It’s an area of my life that I’m working to improve. Before I can make great friends, I need to be a great friend.Read Article

Tags: Communication Community Friendship

Everyone wants a happy marriage, but not everyone is willing to work for it. We’ve become too self-centered to recognize that we can build the marriage of our dreams. We must have the courage to mend our flaws and then the determination to cultivate a vibrant prayer life. If you want to be a more loving and patient spouse, you’ve got to pray at least 30 minutes each day.Read Article

Tags: Communication Generosity Prayer

Life has a way of coming full circle. Just five years ago, when I was young, free, and single, I obsessed over technology. My phone had over 100 apps in the early days of the App Store, and I was always looking for life hacks. I had this impetus to be more productive by using only the best tools. Like my conversion to Jazz (and now Classical) music, I made a major change over the weekend and deleted almost every app from my phone. Why did I feel this need to be free? It all started with a song.Read Article

Tags: Communication Manliness Wellness

There's a tendency in human thought to desire superiority over others. We must show those we resent that we’ve made something of our lives and that it's more than they've done. Thus, we are better than they are. This tendency is destructive and it diverts precious resources away from bettering ourselves.Read Article

Tags: Communication Political Life

I often feel that our ability to communicate is falling into the trap of diminishing returns. New forms of communication, at their start, are very pure. They focus on connecting people in a very personal and intimate way. Over time, external pressures on communications providers cause a dilution of the purity. Communication becomes less about sharing a story, experience, or memory, and more about a transaction.Read Article

Tags: Community Communication

One of my greatest relational weaknesses is a knee-jerk reaction to place blame. It’s a quick reaction and thankfully one that’s rapidly subdued by logic and reason. Still, it's pretty nasty and completely unfair. Few situations rise to the level where blame is even remotely appropriate, but even in those circumstances acceptance of responsibility and devising a path forward are far more productive. The downside to this weakness of mine is the opportunity that it steals from my marriage. It leaves me feeling out of sync with Alison and, in turn, less happy than I would be otherwise.Read Article

Tags: Communication

One of our greatest shortcomings as men is our inability to express, process, or deal with emotions. We know two emotions: passion and anger. The depth of the human experience is lived through the vast spectrum of emotion, each eliciting a different set of responses and lessons. Our female counterparts are often blamed for being too emotional, but I believe that it’s precisely their ability to intuit and live through their emotions that they’re able to live more fully alive.Read Article

Tags: Communication Wellness

I read an interesting opinion article in the Wall Street Journal that took on the issue of a generation of disrespectful children. In the article, the physician writes about his experience of children being overtly disrespectful to their parents during his office visits. While the author acknowledges that not all children misbehave, it's much more prevalent than it was 20-30 years ago. Interestingly, he cites research that demonstrates that disrespectful children, "are more likely to grow up to be anxious and depressed, three times more likely to be overweight, more likely to be fragile, less healthy and less creative, compared with respectful children."Read Article

Tags: Communication Community Friendship

I once read that we ought to make a major decision once and then manage it daily. That's decent advice. I want to live a life in sync where I have clear routines that ensure that I do everything that I want to do, and, most importantly, that my home stays clean. A clean, tidy home is necessary for me to work and make forward progress. Nothing slows me down more creatively than a house in disarray.Read Article

Tags: Communication Wellness

I have a challenge for you this Thanksgiving and Christmas: disengage.Read Article

Tags: Communication Community

It's only when I rush into something that I get burned. Alison and I have recently been car shopping, which in and of itself is a time-pressured experience. Vehicles go up for sale and are sold, sometimes in a matter of days. Like a whack-a-mole game, opportunities come and go in an instant. Especially when it's a major, life altering decision, don't rush.Read Article

Tags: Communication

Is residency over yet? With just under 18 months to go, I'm so done with all of this. Alison's schedule, the shifting sands, and lack of predictability in future planning. It's a part of the process, but that doesn't mean that I have to like it. As a part of this whole experience, Alison and I have really had to spend time rethinking what we need when it comes to time together.Read Article

Tags: Communication Community

There are two critical times of interaction with your wife each day. They are the times are when you say goodbye in the morning and hello in the evening. While both take only moments, I consider them to be real tone-setters for the day.Read Article

Tags: Communication

It's said that we tend to experience God in times of tribulation more than in our daily life. People who have no trials, sorrows, or sufferings struggle to know God because human instinct says that there's no need of God when all is well. The mark of a saint is one who relies on God in all seasons of life, both good and bad. At one time or another, we'll all experience loss and in those times, we should both pray and celebrate lifeRead Article

Tags: Communication Community Friendship

Perhaps the most painful mistakes you or I will ever make will involve money. Bad buying decisions, late payments, or even bouncing a check are all extremely embarrassing life events. We all struggle to let go of dumb money mistakes that we’ve made in the past. Yet, your mistake might not even be an external money mistake. Sometimes money mistakes involve only your family, like going over budget on something. Even though it only involves your family, it’s still embarrassing. It's incredibly important that you be able to forgive yourself and to forgive your wife for money errors.Read Article

Tags: Communication Money

The difference between men and women becomes abundantly clear when it comes to quality time. For men, quality time is like any other allocated time during the day, a set period of time with specific objectives that, once complete, can be moved on from. Women tend to have a more fluid concept of quality time. It's an undetermined length of time and is fulfilled after a certain level of connectedness is reached. In order to help reconcile these differences, I've concluded that we men just need to concede this point. You can't rush quality time and expect meaningful results.Read Article

Tags: Communication Community

A few weeks ago, Alison and I went to a live radio show. That sentence felt weird to type, but it's true. We traveled into Washington, DC to be a part of the studio audience for "The Catholic Guy Show" with Lino Rulli which can be heard on SiriusXM's The Catholic Channel. During the show, I got up on the guest mic and for reasons unknown to me, admitted to an international listening audience that my biggest struggle in the married life is with patience. The fact is, it's true, although I didn't plan on sharing that part of my life when I got on air. There are plenty of times when I get really impatient at even the smallest inconveniences. Yet, I know that I'll never be happy in my marriage or in my life if I'm impatient.Read Article

Tags: Communication Virtue

When we were younger, my brother and I fought. A lot. This was to the benefit of my sister, since our punishment was typically to work together cleaning the kitchen, meaning she had months of practically no kitchen cleaning chores. I remember, after one disagreement, my dad telling us, "If we can't have peace at home, how can we expect to have peace in the world?" Following the news of the conflict in the Ukraine makes me grateful to be an American. I'm grateful that we have safety and security in our own homes and neighborhoods and don't go to sleep at night afraid that our house will accidentally be shelled by artillery.Read Article

Tags: Communication Community

A few weeks ago, I was getting my hair cut. The barber asked what I did, and I told him that I’m a writer and that I write about Christian marriage. The resulting conversation was about his experience of the married life and the times when he really screwed up. I enjoyed our conversation, but I was a bit uncomfortable with the jokes that he was sharing. I love humor and use it in almost every situation, but, in my opinion, jokes about marriage tend to be more damaging than funny.Read Article

Tags: Communication

We all have a bit of a flair for the dramatic. While we may despise personal conflict, we’re a bit partial to the excitement and the unknown that the drama incites. There are endless reality TV shows based solely on the generation of drama. Drama is entertaining.Read Article

Tags: Communication

Sex sells, even when it's irrelevant. Watching commercials during the Super Bowl underscores this interesting point. Advertisers and companies use sex to sell things that really have nothing to do with human sexuality, like web hosting or restaurants. We're a sex-crazed people and it needs to stop.Read Article

Tags: Communication Sexuality Virtue

I've recently started working on a family genealogy project. In the past, I hadn't much cared about my family's history beyond my grandparents, but lately I've become fascinated with our family's story. I'm basing all of my research around Benedict as the starting person and am excited about the journey that this is taking me on. While many of the discoveries have been very exciting, I've noticed something else that's rather tragic. In keeping with what I suspect is par for the course today, in the last 115 years, it's nearly impossible to find any branch of my family within two generations that hasn't been touched by divorce.Read Article

Tags: Communication Education Virtue

Alison's work schedule is, at times, a real challenge for me. On her month of nights, she'd be at home and awake from about noon to 5pm and then gone or asleep for the rest of the day. Some mornings I'd even crawl back into bed for a nap while she was sleeping just so we could be together.Read Article

Tags: Communication Community

There are many commonly held beliefs about marriage that I refuse to subscribe to. Over the past two years, they've been weaved into many of the posts that have appeared on this blog. I don't believe that marriage is about someone being in control. I don't believe marriage is about someone being nothing more than a rubber stamp. I believe that marriage is more than a partnership or a co-venture. Marriage is about a husband and a wife, both pouring themselves completely into relationship and reaping the rewards together.Read Article

Tags: Communication Virtue

There are a lot of things that I'd like to do. Almost every day, I get a new idea for some project or goal that I'd like to work on. It might be an area of my life or schedule that I want to improve, such as incorporating more reading time for Benedict. It might be a new book idea or some new app. All of these ideas are inspiring in the moment and really quite appealing. I'm often tempted to change direction or course and to charge at this new idea. After a few hours or a few days, most of the ideas subside and I'm left with the ones that really mean something to me.Read Article

Tags: Communication Wellness

Recently, I went through all of my Facebook messages and deleted old conversations. I've never been big into using Facebook messages for communicating, but for some odd reason, Facebook preserved just about every message I've sent using the service for the past 8 years. It took me about 2 hours to get rid of all of them, but I did it.Read Article

Tags: Communication Dating

I love Benedict. I love the way he laughs uncontrollably as I hold his arms above his head and tickle his tummy with my nose. I love the way he gets excited when I snuggle up close to him and kiss all over his face. I love how much he enjoys being close to me and sitting in my lap. I love how he'll sit still anywhere if I'm rubbing his back or scratching his head. I love how when he's about to cry or is actively crying, he holds his arms up, hoping that I'll pick him up.Read Article

Tags: Communication Parenting

IKEA just might be the greatest store in the world. The entire showroom is a playground for adults (and kids, too!). When you walk through the aisles, your imagination goes wild and begins putting everything into its place in your home. IKEA is the worst store in the world when you get home.Read Article

Tags: Communication

There’s a belief that whenever spouses have “together time,” they should be actively chatting or interacting. As humans, we need our quiet time to rest, recharge, and restore our creative energies. Together time shouldn’t always be active or talkative, spending quiet time together is just as important.Read Article

Tags: Communication Dating

We have many rooms in our homes, but perhaps the most curious is the bedroom. We have an entire room, sometimes per person, dedicated solely to sleeping. In fact, depending on how much you’re home during the day, it might be the room that you spend the most time in. Your bedroom is a truly sacred space.Read Article

Tags: Communication

Fights in your marriage will happen. They will range in severity, but, from time to time, you will have a serious disagreement with your wife. There’s the right way to handle it and a wrong way to handle it. Usually, I choose the wrong way.Read Article

Tags: Communication

Two weeks ago, Alison and I celebrated our two year wedding anniversary. I’d like to share with you a few thoughts about what I’ve learned so far.Read Article

Tags: Communication Generosity

In your lifetime, you’ll try many new things. You’ll be an amateur at a lot of hobbies. More important than experience, however, is confidence.Read Article

Tags: Communication Generosity

Questions are powerful. Through the power of questioning, you can open up a whole new world. You learn about people, who they are, their unique story and how they view the world.Read Article

Tags: Communication

When you dream, dream big.Read Article

Tags: Communication

The most powerful tool in your marriage is your calendar. Your calendar will always show you what you think is actually important.Read Article

Tags: Communication Community

Technology in our lives has really advanced at an amazing rate over the past 20 years. We’ve gone from a world where electronics made some things in our lives easier to a world where technology is completely immersed in our daily lives.Read Article

Tags: Communication

Relationships have seasons. Sometimes they’re going really well and other times, well, they’re not.Read Article

Tags: Communication

Perhaps the most crippling and meaningless activity in American workplaces is the blame game. Every single worker can easily recall a recent time when an error occurred, and the workforce spent an inordinate amount of time trying to figure out who to blame, instead of fixing the problem.Read Article

Tags: Communication

One of the biggest jumps to make between the single life and the married life is the transition to shared decision making.Read Article

Tags: Communication

If you’re like me, you’re really good at making mistakes. Oftentimes, you’ll reach expert level in your mistakes. When you get stuck in a rut, what does it take to get you out and back on the right path?Read Article

Tags: Communication Community

Daily married life is often light and playful. There are jokes, stories, and general bonding. There will be also times in your marriage when you’ll need to have a serious conversation with your wife. It’s important that the weight of these conversations are well known while you’re having them.Read Article

Tags: Communication

Communication. We all want lots of high quality communication, but it can be difficult to find. In a marriage, communication is essential.Read Article

Tags: Communication

Conflict in your marriage is a certainty. You and your wife are working towards the same goals, but you may each have a different way to get there. There will be a lot of times when you’re in the wrong, but there will also be times when you’re right, but end up losing the fight anyway.Read Article

Tags: Communication Generosity

We live in a culture that despises conflict, but loves drama. We think that conflict means that someone is right and someone is wrong. That’s wrong.Read Article

Tags: Communication

Managing family life is a challenge. With family members running in all different directions, getting everyone together can require some real effort. A great time to get everyone together is around the dinner table.Read Article

Tags: Communication Community

Dreaming is a wonderful thing. In dreams, you can release the physical limitations of the current world and imagine what it would be like to overcome them. Dreams are a not just an escape, they’re a path to the future. As a married person, your dreams have to apply to two people. If your wife isn’t with you in your dream, then you face an uphill battle.Read Article

Tags: Communication Generosity

The most common misconception of Catholic teaching on sexuality is that once you’re married, you’re allowed to do anything sexual you want. The idea is that before you’re married sex is bad and, as soon as you slip the ring on her finger, anything goes.Read Article

Tags: Communication Sexuality

Working in unison with your wife can be a powerful tool. In fact, when you both set your minds to a goal, you can achieve great things together!Read Article

Tags: Communication

We’ve all come to a crossroads. Two paths that certainly have their benefits, but we can only choose one. In our single days the choice might have been hard, but we only had to look to ourselves to make it happen. In the married life, there’s more at stake.Read Article

Tags: Communication

Masculine pride will tell you that apologies are weakness. It will tell you that the person who apologizes first, loses. Masculine pride has also gotten you into a few tight spots before, hasn’t it?Read Article

Tags: Communication Manliness

Many of us have some major trust issues. We've all been hurt deeply by someone we love. Those experiences can be traumatizing to us at the time. They can also have lasting effects on our future relationships.Read Article

Tags: Communication Community Generosity

A great thing about being married is that your spouse is not you.Read Article

Tags: Communication Community

The power of unity in your marriage can’t be underestimated.Read Article

Tags: Communication

=There may come a point in your marriage when you realize something. You and your wife may communicate differently.Read Article

Tags: Communication

Bonding. We all have our favorite “bonding” activities to do with our spouse. Maybe it is curling up with a good book, staying in and watching a movie, or going for a walk in the neighborhood.Read Article

Tags: Communication

One of the most critical skills you can develop in your marriage is the art of negotiation.Read Article

Tags: Communication

One of the concepts that I struggle with is, "Your wife is always right." I make plenty of mistakes, a fact that doesn't bother me. Absolute statements, though, make me cautious. At the very least, they deserve a bit more scrutiny. Read Article

Tags: Communication

On my wedding day, I was a spry young man. As a friend would say, "Just a pup." I was ready to set off on the journey of a lifetime.Read Article

Tags: Communication Generosity